Appendix: A guide to pronouncing English words starting with X

As we all know, there are no words in the English language start­ing with X. So when encoun­ter­ing such a danger­ous beast (known to the select cadre of sport­ing profes­sion­als who seek them for thrills as “X-words”), it is vital to toss the pronun­ci­a­tion rules out the window. It becomes time to free flow it.

Here is a non-exhaus­tive guide to some of the better researched words start­ing with X, for those acolytes of English who need a few steady footholds on their jour­ney towards becom­ing the masters of X.

Xenon: JOY-nahnXena: THEE-nahXOR: ECKS-clue-sieve OREXimenez: <GARGLING SOUND>EH-men-nethXeno­phobe: “so but like really, where liter­ally are you actu­ally from, orig­i­nally?”Xo: any of, or vari­ants on

Remem­ber, these are simply guide­lines, not hard-and-fast rules; fluent speak­ers know to inter­pret them as they please based on gut feel­ings, pulling addi­tional phonemes from their bottoms as needed to battle some of the more monstrous among this list. This is a crucial skill drilled over and over again with words from lists like this one until the English prac­ti­tioner is comfort­able conquer­ing even X-words never yet seen in the Anglos­phere.

Arguable since normally you’d say “e” from a closed glot­tis but “yi” from an open glot­tis. [▲]

The whole point of this exer­cise is to abuse the language, so give me a break. [▲]

On the hope that you pronounce “ei” or “ie” as aɪ (aye); if your “ei” is eɪ and your “ie” is iː then you’ll end up saying “way” and “whee.” Y is simply a much more reli­able vowel for this sound than any of AEIOU, and so it accepts no substi­tutes. Also if you’ve seen pinyin or speak German then “wei” or “wie” just look wrong here. [▲]

Really stress that ʒ; I don’t even know where we got that “zh” sounds like it’s in “beige seizure equa­tion”; I don’t know any Roman­iza­tion that uses that. [▲]